SpaceX’s second Falcon 9 landing in a row is even more impressive than the first

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SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket made a successful landing on a drone ship less than a month ago, the first time that’s been completed successfully. We didn’t have to wait long for the second. Without the hype from the last landing attempt, SpaceX just landed its second Falcon 9 in a row on its unmanned sea platform. This is becoming routine, and paradoxically, that’s really exciting.

The Falcon 9 was launched overnight on Friday to carry a Japanese commercial satellite into a geosynchronous orbit. The satellite had successfully deployed into orbit by the second stage, but that’s not the most interesting thing about the mission. SpaceX downplayed the chances of this landing being a success as it was a much more difficult procedure than the one it completed last time.

The April landing was a fantastic technical achievement, but it was just a NASA resupply mission to the International Space Station. That means the rocket only had to launch the payload to low-Earth orbit. The rocket that just landed was launching a satellite to geosynchronous orbit at an altitude of 20,000 miles — the ISS orbits at about 250 miles. Thus, the latest rocket was traveling twice as fast as the ISS resupply mission, which complicated the landing. That’s a lot more speed that has to be bled away before the rocket can successfully set down on the ship. Musk noted on Twitter that it took three engines firing to decelerate the rocket for landing, whereas the last only needed one.

You can catch the landing at about the 29-minute mark in the video above. The landing happened at night, so we won’t get the same awesome video of this landing as we got of the last one. There’s a flash, and the rocket is on the deck. It’s even a little more centered than the last one. Musk joked on Twitter that SpaceX might need to get a bigger rocket storage hangar.

Of course, the goal is to reuse those rockets to save money. Refueling and refurbishing the first stage is considerably cheaper than building a new one for every launch. A single Falcon 9 costs about $60 million, but the fuel for a launch is only $200,000. SpaceX thinks when you account for refurbishment costs, it can cut launch costs by about 30% .

This launch was the fourth of more than a dozen planned flights this year. Several more flights are planned in the next month or so, and people are going to be watching closer than ever to see if SpaceX can keep this streak going.

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This is a brilliant streak of success for them! We should realistically expect that more things can go wrong in the future, rocketry/space as we know is a very difficult prospect. But we can sure be optimistic!

bobcat4424

SpaceX forecasted that they would eventually recover 40-60% of all
boosters. It appears that they have already achieved that goal. Some idiot wrote an article on “The Verge” that said that Musk’s planning is so poor that they are running out of space to store recovered boosters. It is so obvious that the author is anti-Musk because he doesn’t see that reusable rockets do not require long-term storage as was the case with the Space Shuttle.

The difference that sets SpaceX apart is not reusability but rather the modern manufacturing techniques they have. Everyone else is using craft-made rockets. That means that each rocket is slightly different from all the others with the same designation. For example, no two Space Shuttles had more than 90% parts commonality. When SpaceX encounters a problem it is fixed on all future rockets, so that they are already well over 95% parts commonality, but are still working towards 100%. Not having parts commonality means that true quality control is virtually impossible.

Felix Gill

Musk stated that they did not have storage for the rockets – and Musk did mean long term as this first set of rockets will be saved to study and that will take years probably to asses weaknesses and drive design to future rockets that will be used more than once.

Please note I am not arguing that the author of the article may be anti – musk – just adding more facts.

Cheers

bobcat4424

What the CEO of SpaceX (I’m currently drawing a blank on her name) has indicated is that the first one will be retained as a museum piece after it has received a detailed inspection. The second will likely be used again to loft one or two VLEO payloads and then tested to failure with dummy payloads. The third will be re-used at a 30% discount to the customer. After that it is anyone’s guess.

Because they have recovered boosters, they really don’t need more than two for study. They have one Falcon 1 that flew six times before it failed.

The big difference is that these rockets were designed to be reused. Not reusing them is a huge waste of resources, especially since these are assembly-line boosters and not the 1960’s expendables. Designing for reuse means that they can be more easily inspected, carry much more telemetry, and parts likely to fail can be easily identified and replaced.

Same here. Good post.

msafwan

What incentive is left for improving the design of the rocket if reusing old one is compellingly strong due to it being cheaper… and also the lack of storage space needed to store the next version of that same rockets.

Try keeping same rocket for 2 decade, like the Space Shuttle, and make the ecosystem supporting it bloated to the point it cost $1Billion to launch, like the Shuttle, despite the Shuttle being largely reusable, except its fuel tank.

bobcat4424

That is an economics issue that I am sure Musk is addressing. There will be generations of new rocketry, the Falcon Heavy is an example, coming along. And there is already work on a Falcon 9 replacement.

The Space Shuttle was a different thing and was a huge disaster, especially in the area of reusability. It took months and months to ready a shuttle for relaunch. Each one was different with no two having even 90% parts commonality. It was not so much reusable as rebuildable and yes, it was far too expensive.

Musk’s stated purpose is to reduce the costs of launches by 90%. A good example of the current costs of a launch to GTO. ULA charges around $380 million. SpaceX charges around $90 million to the government and $60.1 million to a private customer. The first reusable booster will likely charge $30 million for the launch. This is such a great difference that ESA, Russian, Japan, India, China et al simply cannot match the price and even with full-tilt government subsidies cannot catch up for 20 or so years. I don’t think Musk will be standing still for 20 years.

The Falcon 9 was designed to be reusable. Unlike the shuttle, SpaceX intends to do only a thorough inspection, refueling, a lock-down test fire, and immediate reuse. That process could actually be done in a couple of days, not the 4-7 months required by the Shuttle.

Joe

Silly argument. The shuttle was ridiculously expensive to relaunch from the get-go because of the EXTENSIVE refurbishment required for the orbiter, the solid rocket boosters (and the fact that the external tank wasn’t reused). If the Falcon 9 requires as little refurb as Spacex currently believes (after retrieving multiple 1st stages and several test fires of at least the first one), it will continue to be orders of magnitude cheaper than the sort-of reusable shuttle. Moreover, Spacex has already demonstrated continuous drive to make launches cheaper — starting with reusability (since even with expendable rockets they were already far cheaper than their competition). Musk has stated that a PRIMARY GOAL of Spacex was to drive DOWN the cost of access to space.

interstellarsurfer

The difference is, these are just launch vehicles, not manned shuttles – failure is always an option. Also, these are vehicles with planned obsolescence baked in. They will be re-used until they’ve generated an acceptable return-on-investment, then decommissioned.

Mel Gross

Actually, it was Musk that said that.

bobcat4424

The first part was from Musk, but the rest was from a Gwynne Shotwell speech. Ans she is COO of SpaceX, not CEO. Sorry for the error.

Igor

Watching it live on webcast, I screamed, “They stuck the landing!!” to my wife, who rolled over and went back to sleep…
Hey, *I* was excited…

The days of the Big Dumb Booster are OVER, NASA.

darkich

Fantastic

182Panas

BS

Jamroast

Goat lovin’

dc

Now if Elon can just invent re-usable toilet paper.

DaKangaroo

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger…

Even faster re-entry and even more accurate landing, and just because they like to show off, they did it at night too! On their robotic floating barge bouncing up and down on waves in the middle of the ocean.

The only sad thing about this, is that it made me realise, one day this is going to be routine, and SpaceX are going to be doing this every fortnight or something, and there won’t be loud cheers every time there’s a landing, or major news articles.

But I get the feeling SpaceX is going to continue to give us new things to cheer about for a long while..

dc

Yes, that happened with NASA. But then again will Musk be content to send earthworms and rats into space for “experiments” for 30 years without doing something new? NASA’s gig became stale and routine because it lacked ambition and the will to take things to the next level.

Marc GP

No, he’s going to Mars before anyone, and we will be there to cheer.

dc

Maybe, or maybe that’s just what he wants us to think. He’s actually going to Mars, yes, but he doesn’t plan to leave any of us behind…..

lagrangia

Alexander of Macedon did not stop at Babylon

dc

But he’d have lived longer if he had.

Chris Roberts

Did a quick search and it turns out he is a fan of Asimov and Heinlein, is he trying to be or just becoming one of their characters?

Asteroid mining and orbital construction platforms coming to a planet near you soon…

DinkSinger

“Thus, the latest rocket was traveling twice as fast as the ISS resupply mission, which complicated the landing. That’s a lot more speed that has to be bled away before the rocket can successfully set down on the ship.”

Not quite. The Falcon 9 was only traveling a little more than 25% faster at MECO (main engine cutoff) on this mission than last month’s mission, 8,355 km/h instead of 6,658. But to achieve that velocity it used up so much more fuel and oxidizer that there could not be a “boostback” burn to slow the vehicle. My understanding is that, in addition to its continuing on a ballistic trajectory so the recovery ship was much farther from shore, this meant that it was traveling twice as fast at the time of the landing burn.

photo_ted

Excuse me being pedantic; the booster does not put the satellite in a geosynchronous orbit, but a geosynchronous transfer orbit or GTO (I just learned this so am sharing my new found knowledge). A combination of the second stage and thrusters on the satellite get it into a geosynchronous orbit. The fact remains that the rocket is moving at double the speed requiring more breaking (three engines vs. one) to bring it down it one piece. An extraordinary accomplishment.

It cost $60 million to make the rocket and refurbishing cost 30% less. Refurbishing the rocket cost $40 million. This is routine maintenance after every trip. And i thought maintaining a Ford was hard.

interstellarsurfer

This is a private company, not NASA. If they say it costs 40M to refurbish – that’s a reflection on how they plan to amortize their investment in the rocket and write off their expenses – not the ‘real’ cost of refurbishment.

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